Destabilized Saturday Edition #11
The left's outdated climate playbook, changing vs. transforming, unity and cocaine orgies, Will Smith and an Antarctic ice shelf
One evening earlier this week, as I was standing in my local pizza joint waiting for four slices to heat up, a 50-something white guy walked in and started chatting me up. “This neighborhood’s changing, huh?” he said.
I live in Bay Ridge, the southwestern-most part of Brooklyn. A generation or two ago it was a mostly white area (Italian, Irish, Greek); today it includes Latino, Asian, and Muslim communities of different sizes.
I replied unenthusiastically, but he was unfazed. “I grew up in Flatbush and that neighborhood’s completely destroyed”
Though real estate prices in that part of Brooklyn challenge his analysis, Flatbush is another once predominantly white area that’s now largely minority1 – Black, Caribbean, and Latino – so I suspected I knew what he meant.
The interaction was brief and one racist lamenting change is hardly newsworthy, but for some reason I’ve been thinking back on it since it happened. In part it’s how he led with it. “This neighborhood’s changing” were the first words he said to me. It’s ambiguous enough for plausible deniability, but from there he plunged right into his Flatbush take so he wasn’t overly concerned about disguising things.
I think the main reason it has stuck with me has to do with the Barton Gellman article Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun, from which I shared excerpts a couple weeks ago. Here’s a passage from it I haven’t yet shared:
Robert A. Pape, a well-credentialed connoisseur of political violence, watched the mob attack the Capitol on a television at home on January 6. A name came unbidden to his mind: Slobodan Milošević.
…Milošević, Pape said, inspired bloodshed by appealing to fears that Serbs were losing their dominant place to upstart minorities. “What he is arguing” in the 1989 speech “is that Muslims in Kosovo and generally throughout the former Yugoslavia are essentially waging genocide on the Serbs,” Pape said. “And really, he doesn’t use the word replaced. But this is what the modern term would be.”
Pape was alluding to a theory called the “Great Replacement.” The term itself has its origins in Europe. But the theory is the latest incarnation of a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants, and the rise of nonwhite citizens, to take power from white Christian people of European stock. When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”
Gellman points out that at the January 6th rally before the assault on the Capitol Trump didn’t freelance his speech as he usually does. Instead, he read from a teleprompter.
“Our country has been under siege for a long time, far longer than this four-year period,” Trump told the crowd. “You’re the real people. You’re the people that built this nation.” He famously added, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Just like Milošević, Trump had skillfully deployed three classic themes of mobilization to violence, Pape wrote: “The survival of a way of life is at stake. The fate of the nation is being determined now. Only genuine brave patriots can save the country.”
In an effort to better understand the January 6th attack and its significance, Pape’s research team (he’s a political science professor at the University of Chicago) gathered information on attendees and then set about analyzing multiple data sets looking for correlations that might shed light on who they were and what brought them there.
The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.
Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.
Another reason this pizza shop interaction has remained wedged in my mind is dawning on me as I type. This guy’s tone was casual, but when he described present-day Flatbush he didn’t say “it’s not the same” or “it was great but it’s different now” or “you can barely recognize it.” His old neighborhood, he said, “is completely destroyed.”
Destroyed.
I could be reading too much into this, but that’s a violent word. A violent word used in saying these places used to be white and now they’re not. In his formulation, that change represents destruction.
Pape saw rhetorical similarities between Trump and Milosevic, but he sees a different historical parallel in the relatively small group of Americans open to using violence to restore the country to the way they wish it to be.
[“In 1968, 13 percent of Catholics in Northern Ireland said that the use of force for Irish nationalism was justified,” he said. “The Provisional IRA was created shortly thereafter with only a few hundred members.” Decades of bloody violence followed. And 13 percent support was more than enough, in those early years, to sustain it.
I hope to God there isn’t civil violence in the United States, my home, in the coming years, but it’s quite possible. Day-to-day, the anger can be hard to see, and it’s difficult to know what’s really in people’s hearts and minds. My brief interaction in the pizza shop gave me a glimpse – at least I think it did. It left me feeling unsettled.
My Work
The secret to buying a home that will hold its value
It’s hard to predict exactly what heavier rains in the future will mean for this house, but we know a few things:
Water risks (basement flooding, mold, etc.) are higher today than they were even just a few years ago.
Water risks will continue to increase into the future.
These increased water risks aren’t yet reflected in the prices of these homes.
Put it all together, and whoever buys this home is taking on climate repricing risk, which is the probability that a given house will be part of the future correction in asset values that occurs as the market comes to understand the magnitude, trajectory, and implications of climate change.
Antifragility and civil violence
When the world is chaotic, people are anxious and want good information so they can understand what’s happening. This spikes subscriptions to the New York Times (as well as increasing the number of readers seeing its ads). Chaos —> subscribers —> zero-marginal-cost revenue.
This is the kind of antifragile behavior we want the companies we invest in to have going into a period of upheaval.
Interesting Reads
The Left’s Climate Playbook Is Already Outdated
Turning Cities Into Sponges to Save Lives and Property
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
(42.5 Celsius = 108.5 Fahrenheit)
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
Via Wikipedia: “Neighborhoods surrounding Bedford-Stuyvesant such as Ocean Hill, Brownsville, Bushwick, Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush, East Flatbush, Canarsie, and East New York were previously overwhelmingly majority Jewish and Italian with Germans and Irish in some sections in early-mid 20th century, but in the later part of the 20th century they slowly shifted into majority Black communities with a few Puerto Rican communities interspersed...”